BillsFanSD

Last week's game featured a bunch of weird officiating decisions like this. The phantom tripping call on Kincaid, the missed fumble recovery, the call for defensive holding on a play where the RB ran directly into the pile, and so on. Each of those was NBD as an isolated one-off, but it felt like literally every contestable call went Washington's way for the entire freaking game. I can see that White rolled out of the end zone, but the interception obviously occurred in the EZ and White is obviously giving himself up. We all see plays like that all the time, and probably 90% of them are ruled as touchbacks.

The Jets have a very good roster that was a QB away from being a playoff team. They went out and got themselves a QB, but he suffered a season-ending injury in week 1. Now they are screwed. That's really all there is to it. It's not complicated. The Jets will be back in the market for a QB this offseason. They'll be fine if they land one and not fine if they don't. If something happened to Josh Allen, I would give up on this season and I imagine everybody else would too. You can't lose your starting QB in the NFL and expect to carry on like nothing happened, unless your starting QB really sucked. The Bills without Allen are not a playoff team. Neither are the Chiefs without Mahomes, the Bengals without Burrow, the Ravens with Jackson, etc. San Francisco is the only team built to survive mediocre QB play.

I thought the clock management was fine. As others noted, the issue there was more about execution than clock management. And besides, sometimes you just really need to make sure you come away with points, and if it's a FG that's fine. Yesterday was one of those times IMO. I hated all the runs on 2nd-and-long and the pass on fourth-and-one, but given that we won the game I guess I don't mind having that film out there.

I don't expect Tua to have a long NFL career. Some guys are just unlucky with injuries, and some guys are legitimately injury-prone because they're undersized, lack situational awareness, or just lack the athleticism to deflect direct hits. If there's one player in the NFL who I think fits the "injury prone" label, it's Tua. Between the hip and all the concussions, I just don't see him lasting. Nothing against the guy. Just calling it like I see it. Tua does not have Dan Marino's ability to avoid damage.

I'm kind of expecting a 17-13 type game because that's what always seems to happen in these kinds of games when everyone expects a track meet. That said, I do feel like we need to crack 30 to feel good about our chances, and I could absolutely see us losing a 38-34 shootout.

I think the Dolphins are a legitimately good team that can make a very deep playoff run. Two years ago we were saying they were a couple of years away. Last year we were saying that they were still a year off. This year they have arrived and they have about as good a chance of winning the AFCE as we do. That said, they struggled to put away the Chargers and Patriots. Sure, they ran up the score on an awful Denver team, but we already knew they had a good offense. And they're still benefiting from the early-season "Make our opponents die of heat exhaustion while we relax in the shade" HFA, which won't last. They're very good and they might win the SB this year, but I don't think we need to crown them in Week 3 quite yet.

It's not just you -- it's worse this year than it has been in years past IMO. I'm inclined to agree that the rustiness we've seen out of the gate this year is mainly due to teams blowing off the preseason.

Losing four straight SBs aged all us more than we'd like to admit.

But Diggs is a professional football player. His job is beating man coverage and finding soft spots in zones. He's responding to Glab on social media with the same off-the-cuff attitude that most average people would have. Tim Graham is also drawing attention to this issue and refusing to let it die by posting about it. And unlike Diggs, Tim Graham knows exactly what he's doing. It is literally his job to understand the media landscape and choose what's newsworthy and what isn't. By covering this, he's making sure that it stays front and center. This is why people hate journalists.

I'm still trying to figure out what it is about Diggs that makes people so mad. Yeah, he's emotionally volatile. But so what. He's extremely good, he obviously wants to win, he's not a me-first guy in the way that some "diva" type players are, and he's never actually done anything legitimately bad, like slapping his girlfriend around or running over a pedestrian while loaded. At some point, it stops being "Diggs can't get along with other people" are more about our own media not being able to get along with other people. Tim Graham is a toddler who just stirs up ***** in a more conventionally-acceptable way than Diggs does. The difference is that Diggs is good at the job that he's being paid to do, and he takes it seriously.

I would be worried about Bing Crosby vs. RT Spencer Brown. Fortunately that's only one matchup.

Yeah between the Raiders' injuries and the Bills's bruised egos, I honestly expect a bloodletting on Sunday. There's no reason why we can't beat this squad by three touchdowns.

I honestly feel bad for the Jets and their fans. I hate New England and Miami, obviously, but I just don't have the same animosity toward the Jets. They're a snakebitten franchises that can't seem to catch a break, so I guess I feel a little bit of affinity toward them. It helps that the Jets and Bills have never really been relevant at the same time, at least since our SB era. If ever there was a roster that is just one above-average QB away from the SB, it is this year's Jets team. They thought they had their QB and it came up snake-eyes. That really hurts bad when you consider the cap implications.

It is worth noting there that the only people I have seen pushing this story or the Terry Pegula story are either (a) fans of this team, (b) members of the Buffalo media, or (c) content creators who produce Bills-related podcasts. That's it. To the degree that the media is digging up dirt about the Bills, it's our media that's doing this. I mean, Michael Irvin taking shots at Diggs or Allen or whatever is to be expected after a terrible loss. That comes with the territory. The people starting food fights in the school cafeteria are our own people.

Are we back in middle school or something? So what if some reporter doesn't like a particular player? Who cares.

Cam Newton was a pretty good pre-draft comp for Allen, but things have changed since then. We have since learned that Allen is 100x the passer that Cam was. I don't see any reason why Allen should start to physically decline any sooner than somebody like Roethlisberger.

It's not 2020 anymore, and my sense is that this playbook no longer works. We'll see I guess. The Buffalo news media still features a lot of the same people who bullied Matt Araiza out of town. This will be a nice test to see how things have changed over the past 12 months.

I am all-in on Allen. I've been saying for years that he is essentially Brett Favre with Steve Young's running ability. He is going to make some amazing plays that we all get excited about, and he is also going to make some bone-headed plays that we all get excited about. Those are two sides of the same coin and you're not going to have the fun-exciting stuff without the irritating-exciting stuff. I for one want to be entertained when I am watching football, and Josh Allen is nothing if not entertaining. We can absolutely win a SB with Josh Allen. Brett Favre has a SB ring. So does Steve Young. So does John Elway. Those are all good comps for Allen. And, of course, if Eli Manning can win two SBs, then any good QB can win at least one if the stars align. It would not surprise me at all if the Bills took a step back this year. That's not because of Allen. It's because we haven't been able to keep up with KC or CIN or even MIA when it comes to adding non-QB talent across the roster. We must do better here, but that doesn't have anything to do with Allen.

This is a very good point too. McDermott is a good coach. But he occasionally does inexplicable things, like punting on 4th and 2 the other night. I know Rodgers was out and so the old-timey defensive coach mindset says "just take the 3 points," but taking the 3 points is wrong. It's wrong period. It doesn't matter whether the opposing QB is Patrick Mahomes or Late Flag From The Internet. It's the first quarter and you get more points on average by going for it in that situation, so go for it. That decision arguably cost us the game despite Allen's abysmal play. McDermott has done a great job of building a winning culture, attracting good players to Buffalo, hiring good staff, etc. He is a very good HC. It just feels like he needs to learn to get the in-game decision-making right, kind of like Andy Reid when he was in Philadelphia.

We have a good FO and good HC. They took a broken, irrelevant franchise and turned it into a contender. They made some mistakes along the way -- who doesn't? -- but clearly they did something right and it wasn't just getting lucky at QB. The problem is that this team has reached a point where the "rebuild" has run its course. Think about some of the key guys we added around the time McBeane arrived or in the season or two after. Many of those guys have already come and gone -- the John Browns and Frank Gores and Cole Beasleys and Quentin Spains of the world. Those players were very helpful in getting the franchise turned around, but they were all short-term hole-pluggers. Those aren't the players I'm talking about. I'm talking about the core players that we have built around, like Morse, Poyer, and Hyde. Those guys are all getting long in the tooth and are in need of replacement. We're going to be talking about Dawkins and Tre like that before too long, and maybe Dawkins is already there. None of those guys have been replaced, and we don't have their future replacement on the roster. We dumped Edmunds -- correctly IMO -- but we don't know if we actually have a replacement for him on our roster or not. We still haven't found a clear CB2. We've known that this is an issue for multiple seasons. We blew a first-round pick on the position. We have better depth at CB than we used to have, but arguably our starters were stronger a few years ago when it was a 100% Tre + JAG. Now it's an injury-depleted Tre and Benford. Maybe that's an upgrade, but I don't think it's obvious. This team is going to need to turn over some of its older players in the very near future, and it needs a talent infusion to replace them. We haven't gotten that talent infusion because our last few draft classes have been average to below-average. Hopefully the 2023 draft class will fare better. But we're going to need to perform better in the draft and FA going forward if we don't want to slip behind other teams. Also, I am deeply skeptical that the HC should also be managing the defense. If McDermott proves me wrong, great. But it is not normal for a team's long-time DC to just randomly take a year off and have the HC take over. That is a sign that something is weird in the building.

For the record, I wouldn't care if he said exactly what was stated in the complaint. That falls into one of those "true things that we're not supposed to say out loud" category, and I just can't bring myself to worry about stuff like that.

Just another wasted 1st/2nd round pick. No biggie.

Honestly it would be good for me to be a little less invested in this team than I was this time last year. That will probably change around 7:00 ET later today, but ideally I would chill a bit until we get past Thanksgiving.

Very happy with it. I had DTV for about 25 years, and this was my first week with YouTube TV. Overall I thought this worked really well. Over the course of my Sunday, I gradually landed on multi-screening my game of choice (which was MIA-SD yesterday pm) along with RZ. That made it easy to loosely follow all the other games while really watching the one I was most interested in. The Miami game ended up being the game of the day, but if it had gotten out of hand I could have easily switched to a more competitive matchup and feel like I had a decent handle on how the game had gone up to that point. I had a handful of short, 1-2 second buffering episodes here and there, but it was no big deal. Thumbs up so far.

I was agreeing with you . . .